


Maybe If We Burn It

by thousandmonkeys



Series: Touken Week 2k14 [1]
Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: And lots of shortcake, Can we bottle and sell Kaneki's saliva to hungry ghouls, F/M, Fluff, Not to Tsukiyama though, toukenweek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2014-11-03
Packaged: 2018-02-23 23:38:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2560004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thousandmonkeys/pseuds/thousandmonkeys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So it turns out that ghouls can taste human food; the only price is embarrassment, after all. And putting Kaneki at severe risk of dehydration if it's kept up, but eh. He signed up for it. {Day 1 of Touken Week, Cooking}</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe If We Burn It

“Eh, Touka, you don’t like biscuits?” Yoriko looked up from the sugary confection—something strawberry, if the sickly pink colouring was anything to go by—eyebrows raised in astonishment. Plucking a wafer from her lunch, Yoriko waved the plain looking confection in the other girl’s face, clearly intending for her friend to take it. “Not even shortcake?”

Touka stared at the lightly browned pastry with an appraising eye: it looked plain enough, so that was one less risk of tasting like mouldy feet, but the crumbs would be hell to get rid off afterwards. And the  _milk_! She could already taste the rolling nausea that was sure to follow.

She tried to squirm away, just enough that Yoriko couldn’t  _reach_ her and—

Her friend darted forward with more agility that Touka had thought any human could possess.

Oh god. Why.

The taste of rot and oil hit her immediately, and the girl struggled to keep her face passive.“…Yeah. It’s great,” she finally said, a weak smile making its way across her face. “I’m not hungry anymore, though.” Definitely not; god, her stomach would be turning for  _weeks_.

“Are you  _sure_?” Yoriko leaned forward, concern written across her features, lightly pinching Touka’s cheek. “Look at you, you don’t have a single ounce of fat on you.”

“Please no?”  Touka pleaded, pulling up her best I’m-a-high-school-girl-don’t-tempt-me face.

Her friend giggled, and withdrew the offending pastry. “Are you on a diet or something? You haven’t been eating much lately. Trust me, you don’t need it.”

 That much was true; after the Gourmet had managed best her, Touka had decided that no, Yoriko may be her best friend, but eating every single thing that she cooked was going too far, even for the bounds of friendship. And god help her if she’d ever found herself weakened by human food again.

“Yoriko, I—“

 _I can’t eat human food_  tried to twist its way out of her mouth, a siren call.

For a moment she teetered...And instead she shrugged, averting her gaze. “Not much appetite. Anemia,” she said, and lasped into silence.

Yoriko patted Touka’s arm, and turned her attention back to her exceedingly  _healthy_  lunch. “Mm.”

\---

Anteiku’s warmth was a familiar balm against the chilly autumn air, and Touka had never felt more thankful for hearing the hiss of the coffee-machine. The aroma of roasting beans helped take away some of the oil she could  _feel_  lining her insides from the earlier misadventure.

Setting her bag down, she cast her eyes about the room, sighing appreciatively at the lack of customers. The Manager wasn’t in, evidently; so much the better, since his absence meant a lack of trouble-seekers.

And it looked like Kaneki’s shift had just ended, if the casual attire was any indication.

Just the person she needed. The half-ghoul was quite possibly the only person that could give her any kind of useful advice. Without her having to kill them, of course.

Standing behind him, she waited for him to look up; he made no indication to do so, even though he was clearly aware of her being behind him, shifting slightly to make room on the bench.

“Oi,” she whispered, trying to keep her voice lower than the ambient music. “Kaneki. You got a moment?”

Okay, maybe asking for a favour in  _this_ way wasn’t the best way to go about things, but it was good enough.

He looked up slightly, eyebrows raised in concern. “…Touka?” 

She nodded, indicating for him to go on.

“Well, I’m  _mostly_ done with reviewing the chapter, but there’s always other things…But yeah. I’m free.”

She bit at her lip, trying to organize her thoughts: ok, he was free; ok, maybe her endless curiosity could be satisfied for once; ok, maybe she could actually tell Yoriko what she sincerely thought of at least  _one_ human food, for once.

“This is going to sound really weird, but…”

“But?”

“What in the world does shortcake taste like?”

“Like shortcake, I guess?” he responded automatically. “I don’t really know how to describe it. ”

She looked at him with a deadpan stare: the silence seemed to proclaim  _you idiot_ with the subtlety of a marching band.  _Yes I totally know what shortcake tastes like. And this is to waste your time. Yes. Continue please_.

“Oh. Right,” he finally realized, tips of his ears flushing red. “Well, it smells like butter, and vanilla. The texture’s like a soft cookie, I guess, quite brittle but chewy at the same time? Uhm…”

She sighed, turning away: it was a pointless exercise, anyways. Even if Kaneki was the best orator in the world, there was just no possible way for her to reconcile the senses she had with the senses of a human; hell, his description of  _brittle, but chewy_ , seemed to sound like skeletal muscle more than anything else. 

"Forget it..."

“We could always try to make it?” he suggested, eyes brightening with the prospect. “I mean, if sugar cubes can be eaten, maybe we could do something similar with shortcake?” he paused, turning the idea over in his mind. “I can tell you if it’s the same,” Kaneki added as an afterthought. “I mean, close enough.”

That was more than she was expecting, to be honest, and she wasn’t sure to respond to his offer; so she responded in the only way she knew: shrug it off and busy herself with work.

“Thanks, I guess,” she mumbled. “Want me to get you a refill?” she offered, looking pointedly at the empty cup beside him.

“That would be great.”

 ---

_** Trial 1: The Kaneki Matriarch’s Recipe (with human blood sugar cubes but who’s counting) ** _

The oven  _dinged_ eagerly, the red glow inside fading. Touka opened the door with apprehending mitts, with Kaneki peering from behind her shoulder, frowning. Immediately, the smell of charcoal and old socks wafted out.

“No.”

“No.”

They looked at each other, and shrugged as one. “Might as well give it a shot?” Kaneki tried.

Touka pursed her lips, and started fanning the blobs—and that was what they were, blobs, kind of brown, and smelling of the garbage drain after a rat had drowned in it—with a paper fan; the  _manekineko_ printed in garish neon greens tried its best to shine through the fumes. It wasn’t bright enough.

An arm reached out from behind her, grabbing the least burnt of the blobs, and the owner plopped it into his mouth.

“…” Touka stared at her friend for a moment, and, never one to back down from a challenge, grabbed a blob at random, biting down on it.

“Eurgh!” she grabbed a thermos, washing the rotting taste out with a generous gulp of coffee. “How does it taste  _worse_ than normal?”

Kaneki spun on his heel and headed straight to the sink.

She watched his back, and tried to disguise her disappointment with a casual drawl. “Well. That was a success.”

“Too…too much milk?” Kaneki offered, trying his best not to gag, face bravely scrunched up. “How does it taste so watery? It’s  _burnt_ for god’s sake!”

“Better question: doesn’t blood coagulate when you warm it.”

“I  _think_ it does. Tsukiyama would know, though.”

“We are notgoing to bring somebody into your apartment to eat you. I don’t want to clean up the mess.”

 ---

_** Trial 2: The Internet’s Advice Should Always Be Taken At Face Value ** _

“It says…bake at 500 degrees,” Kaneki said, voice filled with doubt. “Then again, the reviews say -0.5 stars.”

Touka hummed thoughtfully. “That would make sense, though. If it tastes bad to humans it would taste good to us, right?” or, at least that was the jump in logic which had stemmed from the duo’s desperation to get  _something_ ,  _anything_ , done.

“Fahrenheit?”

The measurement suddenly sounded in the otherwise silent room, and Touka arched a brow at him.

The boy shook his head, leaning back from the blue glow of the computer screen. “Well, alright, since we’re going by the opposites theory…”

She nodded, moving the mouse to print out the recipe. The printer made an ominous  _clack-clack-clack_ sound as it practically devoured the scrap paper.

“500 degrees Celsius it is, then.”

\---

_** Trial: To the power of nth. ** _

“Let me go get the chemistry textbook. Maybe if the proteins in coffee are replicated, maybe we can eat this.” Kaneki suddenly said, standing back from the lumps of dough, still unbaked but already dangerously brown-looking.

Maybe they shouldn’t have put the liver into this one.

“You…you want to add science to cooking?” She simply couldn’t see how it could be of any help.

“It’s worth a shot!”

Touka sighed, turning off the pre-heating oven. The boy seemed to have a momentum all of his own, now that he was excited about the idea of possibly eating human food again, driven by a vitality she’d rarely seen in him.

\---

**_Trial Maybe If We BURN IT_ **

She started up from the gelatinous blobs of dough; the shortcakes has morphed from dough to some strange pudding-esque consistency, and she swore they were growing  _hands_. Or indents.

Indents meant to suck the life out of an unsuspecting ghoul. And eat them. May the Doves never lay their hands on this monstrosity. They wouldn’t even need quinqes anymore; just set the monster shortcakes loose.

“I’m going to kill it with fire,” she declared, and threw the blobs on the stove.

Kaneki stifled a yawn, and moved to open the shutters; the landlady would probably end up smelling the burnt charcoal, but hopefully she would ignore it. It wasn’t like anybody could tell what the charred biscuits were, anyways. Not when Touka was gleefully toasting the failed biscuits to smithereens.

“Just don’t use up all the gas. It’s expensive.”

\--

_** Trial 32: It’s 3.a.m, and I am convinced that the Oven is the Soundtrack of Hell. ** _

The metallic beast that had become the centre of the kitchen—quite possibly a black hole sucking in the apartment around it— was sputtering ominously, and the incubating monstrosities seemed to grow faces even as she watched.

Kaneki shuddered and backed away from it, turning to pick up the recipe book once again. He hummed in that way of his, as if a radical thought had struck him, and turned to his partner-in-baking-crime. “Touka, I found—”

“This is  _hopeless_!”

Unfortunately, Touka’s frustration and innate impatience had finally risen to the surface. Throwing her hands in the air with all the theatricality of a fifth-grade Drama teacher, she started up, pacing around the kitchen. “I’m sorry for wasting your time Kaneki, I think ghouls just aren’t meant to eat human food.” Which was a horrendous disappointment, but nothing she hadn’t expected. Hell, the fact that the burnt, charred ‘shortcakes’ that they had make managed to be digested still managed to amaze her.

Kaneki watched her pace around the room, eyes following the hypnotic swing of her hoodie’s strings. A thought struck him: “Touka, why do you want to know what human food tastes like?”

Maybe the fumes were getting to him, but the rare show of straightforwardness seemed well received, and Touka sighed, plopping down on the cold floor next to him. Opening the window was quite possibly the best idea they’d had all day, and she sat square in front of the incoming breeze; hot air from the oven in front, cold air from the window in the back; and all around amazing.

She considered his statement for a moment before venturing a single word, simply stated, but carrying the weight of a thousand different sentiments. “Yoriko.”

“Ah.” Silence; she tilted her head to look at him. He must be thinking about that friend of his—Hideyoshi, or something. Unwilling to break the silence, it was Kaneki who spoke first. “I see.”

Abruptly, he stood up in a quick stretch. “It’ll work, for sure.”

Touka sized him up appraisingly; Kaneki had never been unfit, but the regular exercise was doing the boy some good, and the muscles in his arms were infinitely better defined. She smiled at his optimism, but she couldn’t help but look away, fixing her eyes on the timer instead. “Yeah, but how long is it going to take?”

As if on cue, the oven made its usual contribution to the kitchen, the wretched  _bz-ding._  If there  _was_ a Hell, Touka was about a hundred percent sure that that the oven was the background music to which some demon in a spandex suit would dance to. Whilst shoving shortcake into various orifices; really, it sounded like her kind of job.

“Well, not very long, if that’s any indication,” Kaneki said lightly, voice interrupting her thoughts and bringing her focus back to reality. A slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, he opened the oven door for what seemed like the thousandth time—although it was probably closer to forty.

Eh, who was counting.  

It looked worse than eve, but the rolling steam emanating from their creation seemed… _less_  nauseating this time. More like the cafeteria’s fresh garbage than weeks-old rotting fermented waste.

“Oh god. I think it’s either the sleep deprivation getting to me, or does this actually taste  _edible_?” Touka declared incredulously, eyes wide. “Wait. Let me try something,” she said, holding up her hand.

Kaneki paused, warily staring at the palm like it was going to hit him. The shortcake was held loosely at the corner of his mouth,

On an impulse, she leaned in, and plucked the biscuit from Kaneki’s lips; ignoring the brush of flesh against her own fingers, she popped the slightly damp confection in her own. “I…I can taste it…I think,” she slowly said, unsure.

Maybe it was just Kaneki’s freaky half-sweet half-bitter characteristic taste, but for once, there was something that she couldn’t exactly place, something that reminded her more of flowers and the earth than the rot and mould she’d come to associate with eating any kind of food.

Or maybe that was wishful thinking; the familiar taste of oil returned in full force, and her eyes watered. “Hold that thought,” she said, and reached for a tissue. Damn. She’d liked that taste, whilst it lasted; humans were too lucky, really.

Touka sighed, looking up at her friend, about to call it a day, but paused.

Kaneki was already nibbling at another one of the biscuits, and after what seemed like eternity, he nodded. “Yeah, there’s  _something_ at the beginning.”

She frowned at him. “It’s probably your own saliva, you know,” she ventured, ignoring the pounding litany of too awkward, too awkward, too  _awkward_  that drummed in her head like a bell.

Or maybe your weird half-kakugan means that cookies become half-way decent around you, the brunette thought, but kept it to herself.

“Or maybe you just burned off your taste-buds too many times eating scalding hot cookies,” she said instead, getting up to lean out of the window for a breath of fresh air.

But the boy didn’t seem to pick up on her embarrassment, instead offering a half-eaten biscuit to her. “Maybe. Do you want me to stop?” 

She shrugged, taking the proffered shortcake. She doubted this was what Yoriko meant by shortcake being delicious, but seeing as this was the first time Touka had ever managed to hold some fragment of humanity—

“Nah. The cookies taste too good.”

**Author's Note:**

> Wishful thinking on my part, probably. We all know that ghouls can't eat human food, but Kaneki, being half-human, might just make things taste halfway decent; maybe it's not just Tsukiyama. Maybe it's Touka too.


End file.
